


The Boy and The Wolf

by The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting



Category: The Greatest Showman (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Fairy Tale Style, M/M, Magical Realism, Unconventional Format, who knows really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 12:15:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17324822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting/pseuds/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting
Summary: Phillip Carlyle's story, retold as a fairytale.~Once, there was a boy. There was a boy, and a path, and the boy was told he must never, ever stray from it.





	The Boy and The Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> Completely different to what I've written before. But the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Make of it what you will!  
> Many thanks to [The Missing Mask](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMissingMask/pseuds/TheMissingMask) for all of the encouragement on this one!

Once, there was a boy. There was a boy, and a path, and the boy was told he must never, ever stray from it.

Every day the boy walked, with his parents guiding his every footstep. He was not allowed to linger, to stray, to falter. Every movement he made was monitored. Every placement of his feet was watched, altered, corrected. His parents’ words were hard as they guided him. Sometimes, their hands were harder still. 

As the years went by, there was less need for them to guide him. They could lead and they believed the boy would follow. And follow he did, out of habit, and routine, and fear. Fear of his parents reprimands. Fear of what he had been told lurked just off the edge of the path – worlds that would trick him, monsters that could eat little boys like him whole.

The boy walked the same path for so long, the bricks repeating and repeating beneath his feet that he started to wonder if his shoes were eroding the path beneath him, or if his feet were being worn away in turn. He fell behind his parents. He was tired. He wanted to rest. He wished for nothing but to lie down on the path and let it consume him, as he knew it eventually would.

This went on for so long that the boy stopped being a boy, and became a man. Still he followed the same old path. He had realised now that it would go on forever.

Then, one day, he fell even further behind. His parents didn’t bother to look back for him, and he paused for a while. He felt like he was being watched but for a while when he looked around all he could see was the path, and the trees, and the darkness between them. So he walked a little further. That was when he met the wolf.

The wolf was standing at the side of the path, never touching the stones the boy had always walked upon, but walking alongside them instead. The wolf talked to the boy who was now a man. He called to him, tried to get him to leave the path. The man wouldn’t, at first, but the wolf’s words were enchanting, his voice soft. His eyes stared so long at the man that it was almost, _almost_ like being hypnotised.  But then the wolf would not force the man. He would not take him unwillingly. So he turned and started to walk back into the trees. When the man followed, it was of his own free will and the fact he could not bear to never look into the wolf’s eyes again.

The wolf led him through the trees. He let the man rest his hand upon him, so that they would not get separated, and took the man to his home. First, the man could hear music, drifting through the dark. Then they arrived, and colour burst through the trees. It was more colour than the man had ever seen before, and filled with people stranger than he had ever met before. Many seemed more animal than human. Men whose strange bodies contorted as they danced, as elegant and fluid as water. Women with voices so beautiful that you soon realised it didn’t matter what they looked like. There were even people who flew through the air, like birds, and they in particular called to the man who had for so long had his feet on the same solid ground. The man realised that this was what the wolf hunted, these strange exotic animals. He brought them all back here, to his home. Not to hurt them, but to help them. The man knew he had been hunted too, but he couldn’t say why. There was nothing unusual about him amongst these dazzling people.

They were all the freest creatures the man had ever seen. But they were also trapped. The moment they stepped outside of the enchanted home the wolf had made for them, they would be targeted, attacked. Their difference was shining out of them like a beacon, calling people nearer, and scaring them away in the same breath. 

They were safe, while the wolf remained. But he was so fond of hunting new and wondrous creatures. And he had heard of a song bird which he longed to track down for his own.

For a while the man moved backwards and forwards between the path he had always known, and the new world that the wolf had shown him. He found it harder and harder to return to the path each time he did. Eventually, he returned to find his parents waiting for him. They made it clear to the young man that if he went back to the other world again, then they would bar the path to him. He would never again be able to return to them or the path he had known, had walked since childhood. So when he turned and walked into the trees once more, it was to turn his back on everything he had ever lived before. He walked until the trees grew up around him and blocked his parents, permanently, from his sight.

At the same time, the wolf left and took most of the light with him. For a while, the man felt as trapped between the trees as he had done with his parents. He longed to fly, as artfully as others did in this place. But no matter how he stretched his arms he could not follow them into the sky. They showed him the bars of the place they were in, there to keep them safe, but marking the limits of how far they could fly. Even if the man could take to the sky, he would not be free.

Without the wolf there, the world was vulnerable. The man could not defend it.

Fire builds quickly in the forest. There is much material to feed the flames. A blaze was set alight to burn the wolf’s world to the ground in his absence, and burn it did, until nothing but ashes remained. The man had little time to care for that, too busy ensuring the creatures, his friends, had made it out unscathed. When he realised that the most beautiful, shining creature was still trapped inside, he risked his life to save her.

She saved herself, in the end. The man still nearly died in her place.

When all hope seemed lost, the wolf returned, and pulled the man from the flames.

When the man awoke, it was to find the old world gone, and the wolf quite lost without the man’s presence and without the home he had worked so hard to build.

So, for a change, the man helped the wolf instead. And the wolf, for a change, let someone else build a new home for him.

Then the man realised what he should have seen from the start. The wolf was also a man, had been so all along.

And together they could at last grow wings....

And learn to fly...


End file.
